Rrrright now you can get a rabble of the master’s songs starting with “R” if you go to Paul’s homeage and follow the links to A to Z.
Over the last few years, Paul Kelly has performed a series of unique shows under the banner ‘A to Z’, whereby he sings 100 songs from his catalogue in alphabetical order over 4 nights. He is mainly alone on stage, joined occasionally by guests. These shows have sold out consistently in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, and Adelaide.
Every month, for FREE download one letter’s worth of songs will be available here at his website.
At the end of two years, over 100 songs will have been available for free downloads.
Some months will be fat, others skinny but rest assured, throughout, you will hear Paul Kelly’s characters portrayed in his lyrics as they love, marry, give birth, die, and speak.
And soon there will be, as Paul so succinctly says, A to Z – “S”
A shitload, a swarm, a sibilance, a storm, a (t)sunami of “S”s for all you sweethearts this month. Dan Kelly helps me out on a few, Sian Prior plays clarinet on Summer Rain and Trev Warner from Adelaide plays mandolin on Stumbling Block.
Surely God Was A Lover is based on a poem by John Shaw Neilson written around a hundred years ago. Sydney From A 747 dips the hat to the elusive Texan band The Flatlanders, and their song Dallas From A DC9.
Suck ‘em and see. Shake the sauce bottle and all that. There’s a ton of Ts coming so make some room on those hard drives.
SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING
SMOKE UNDER THE BRIDGE
SOMEWHERE IN THE CITY
SONGS OF THE OLD RAKE
SOUTH OF GERMANY
STANDING ON THE STREET OF EARLY SORROWS
STORIES OF ME
STUMBLING BLOCK
SUMMER RAIN
SURELY GOD WAS A LOVER
SWEET GUY
SYDNEY FROM A 747
Also on the website are some loving tributes to Maurice Frawley, with whom I spent some time working while he was in various versions of Paul’s bands in the early eighties – and of course the music scene in Melbourne was so tight (in more than the cohesive sense!) that you couldn’t avoid such a lovely guy as Maurice.
My pick of the tributes is this from Bill Miller, ex (I think) of the short-lived Melbourne pop group The Ferrets.
In the Australian rock music scene, there aren’t many fully fledged, over 50, gypsy musicians, who live for their music, and live hard, yet are loved by all they meet. Maurice was one. Yarn with him, and the topic would very quickly be ‘music’, and his face would light up with the sheer joy of being a part of that world. He genuinely encouraged every muso he came in contact with. Young or old. A circle was completed last year when Maurice taught guitar at Rochester High School.
He was one of the old style Aussie rockers who loved nothing more than jamming with his many mates. This habit of jamming, which was like eating or breathing to Maurice and his ilk, has all but died out in today’s music world of samples, computers and keyboards.
I ran into him at the end of one of his country tours, and asked him how he was going. His black jeans had obviously been on him for a few weeks (par for the course for gypsy musicians), and he looked a little dishevelled, but that glint was in his eye as he smiled: “I’m good, I’ve just got a little bit of Tourbum.” Like nearly every line he came out with, that line sounded like the opening to yet another Frawley gem of a song.After his stint in ‘The Japanese Comix’ (1979-80), he co-wrote classic pop songs, including “Look So Fine, Feel So Low,” during his time as a guitarist with Paul Kelly and the Dots (1980-84). ‘The Olympic Sideburns’ (1983-86), producing an EP for ‘The Romeos’ (1989) and ‘Maurice Frawley’s Big City Burnout’ (1990) followed, before Maurice penned a string of top shelf cds which he performed with his band “The Working Class Ringos” (1993-2006). From 2006 he wrote, recorded and performed with ‘Maurice Frawley and The Yard Hands’.
